For someone who doesn't typically read a lot of mysteries or thrillers, I felt catapulted into a whole new realm when I started reading the true crime book I'll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara. It's one thing to know that a story is made up in the fictional world, but to have it top of mind that the absolute horrors inflicted by the man she dubbed The Golden State Killer actually happened to real people leading everyday, normal lives was a lot to initially take in.
For the first hundred or so pages, I was trying to decide if I should stick with the book. Not because it wasn't well written (far from that - and more on that in a moment) but because of my mounting paranoia. I would come home alone and think about how the GSK would scope out and prowl around houses before he committed his awful atrocities. I'd sit on the couch reading about how he would climb on house rooftops, as squirrels trampled back and forth across my own roof. He would scurry around in the pitch-black cover of night, the inhabitants none the wiser as their windows turned into mirrors showing their every move, I would read, as I sat in my own lit-from-within house with no curtains. One day, as I took a break from reading for a bit, I glanced at the cover and realized with a shiver that the house pictured on the front looked nearly identical to my own...
I'm so glad I set my paranoia aside and kept with this book, even though it was a chilling read. As I was doing the equivalent of peeking through my fingers while reading this book, the author, Michelle McNamara, had the opposite reflex while writing it. After a girl in her neighbourhood became the victim of an unsolved murder when Michelle was a young teenager, she developed a lifelong fascination with cold cases and it became her primary passion. She started a website, True Crime Diary, and her focus eventually turned to the Golden State Killer. She dedicated hours of her life, years in fact - all of her spare time spent poring over crime reports, combing through old evidence files, developing close ties with detectives, criminology specialists and fellow people on the internet who shared her same fascination with unsolved cases.
As I turned each page and the number of rapes climbed to an unfathomable number (fifty awful atrocities) and the GSK's violence progressed to multiple murders (ten violent, horrific ones), I couldn't help but feel perplexed as to how such an unhinged person could commit such a terrifying number of crimes and yet evade capture year after year. It became intensely frustrating for me as a reader, so I can't imagine how magnified that frustration would have been for the dozens of people who worked on the cases over the years. What stamina it would have taken to have investigated such epic numbers of leads without a satisfying culmination in arrest for all of that hard work. The GSK's first known crimes started in 1976 and went on for a dizzying ten years. He was so particular about the houses he would stake out and break into, he would have entry and exit points and floor plans figured out ahead of time. He would profile his chosen victims beforehand, learning not only the minutiae of their own daily habits but even those of their neighbours, so well that he created a near-foolproof campaign of terror. Yet his acts weren't perfect - he left behind footprints and small trails of evidence along the way - but he was stealthy, agile and exceedingly patient. His m.o. became gradually more bold, but he would somehow manage to avoid being caught, his scent trails disappearing as he'd escape at the last minute into vehicles. He was thisclose to capture and recognition on so many occasions, but every time, at the last minute, it was as though he had an invisibility potion. There were certainly quite a few near-misses and, when analyzed, his patterns of movement, his ski masks and attire, his weapons, his criminal methods were so similar, but this was one extremely deranged man who absolutely excelled at what he did.
Because of Michelle McNamara's uncommon ability to not only compile but relay these true stories with an interweaving of authority and heart, at no time does this chilling storytelling veer into salaciousness. She brought a human touch to her subjects, sharing small details that give us both context and background glimpses of the women, ensuring they are known as humans and not just mounting numbers in a senseless crime spree. The 300 or so pages she wrote are a juxtaposition of good and evil: they capture Michelle's intense, compassionate desire to help find justice and her subject's display of the opposite, as he reduced his female victims to objects he would gag, tie up, rape, and later on, bludgeon. Evidence of her unique journalistic style is most noted when, sadly, she passed away in 2016 when her book was only partially completed. Her lead researcher, Paul Haynes, and an acclaimed investigative journalist and friend, Bill Jensen, took over the overwhelming task of going through all of her notes and completing the book for her. The thirty pages written in their voice, while thorough and respectful, just doesn't match Michelle's warm style. They admit they even tried to replicate it in order to maintain the flow of the book, however quickly abandoned trying when they just couldn't quite duplicate her unique voice.
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How equally frustrating yet joyful it is that just two months after this book came out, the Golden State Killer was finally captured through DNA technology that hadn't even been invented when the GSK started off on his mission of terror. Only frustrating because Michelle was so passionate about tracking him down (she was adamant that she didn't care if it was she who found him or anyone else - she just wanted him locked up and brought to justice) that I desperately wanted her to see this conclusion after all of her endless years of hard work. I happened to find out just before I began reading this book that the crime had been solved, so I was anxious to get to the end so I could read the media coverage and find out the identity behind the grizzly headlines. It was a perfect conclusion to a compelling, thoroughly well-written book and it's satisfyingly evident that all of Michelle's years of hard work were not for nothing.
I'm sure the after-effect of paranoia of reading this book will slowly fade, but until then, I'll definitely be locking my doors...
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